Toward a Global Intellectual History of “Minority”

The term minority is today applied to describe beleaguered, persecuted, and exiled people whose subordination is preserved or merely “tolerated” by majoritarian politics inherent to modern states. As this introduction indicates, however, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries minority politics became a rubric for sociopolitical emancipation, providing a framework for intellectuals in colonized Asia and Africa to question European powers' treatment of marginalized communities. Bar Sadeh and Houwink ten Cate contend that “minority” has unique value as an instrument for historical analysis that is restricted neither solely to minority-majority relations nor to debates about (political) representation. Instead, the authors propose a global intellectual history of “minority” as a concept and experience, which is explored in the essays compiled in this special section, “Minority Questions.” By examining the diverse genealogies of the concept of minority, the essays that follow provide a valuable contribution to efforts to redress historical wrongs, even as they offer a range of explanations for the enduring legacy and power of this multifaceted concept.

National Minorities in the Post-Revolutionary Era

This study looks into Ukraine’s minority politics after the Revolution of Dignity of 2014. It analyses the inclusivity of minority politics against three key parameters – institutional framework, dialogue mechanisms, and non-discriminatory policies. The research is conducted through an in-depth comparison analysis of minority politics of two post-revolutionary presidents – Petro Poroshenko (full term) and Volodymyr Zelenskyi (first two years). The conclusion is made that the political elites failed to drive an inclusive course towards ethno-linguistic minorities. The inclusivity along the three criteria has been provided impetus either on ad-hoc basis or not at all. On the level of policies, a regression can be observed. The underlying cause for the state not succeeding in achieving an inclusive minority course is that the two administrations had predominantly divergent motives for addressing this topic. As a result, the implementation of some inclusivity-oriented measures suffered and the minority-related discourse became highly politicized.

Minority Actorness Through a Non-Europeanised Policy Area

By bringing together the literatures on Europeanisation and minority studies, this article illustrates the centrality of actors representing national minorities as a key to understand Europeanisation of minority politics today. Minority politics is becoming Europeanised indeed, however, not in the ways commonly expected. And although the EU repeatedly fails to develop a clear minority policy, an actor-centred approach adopted in this study helps to reveal how minority actors extend their political strategies to the European level through different channels and how they exploit various opportunities stemming from European-level politics. Jacquot and Woll’s concept of ‘usages of Europe’ not only enables us to trace how actors multiply channels and arenas of participation, but it also helps to spot the emergence of tactics of experimentation with European-level norms and rules, contributing to an acquisition of new roles among minority actors and supporting an actorness formation among those active. As the actors engage in criticising EU institutions, they develop tactics of responsibilising which in turn affects their minority agendas and the actors themselves. In this respect, this study contributes to developing the weakly studied literature about minority agency and Europeanisation.

DEMOCRACY, POLITICAL IDENTITY, AND THE FATE OF MINORITY POLITICS: REFLECTIONS TOWARDS INDONESIA’S NATIONAL CONCURRENT ELECTIONS IN 2024

The 2019 and 2014 General Elections in Indonesia was laden with religious identity politics. The election of the DKI Jakarta Governor in 2017 confirmed the politics of religious identity. People were fed up of continuing the democratic process because black and dirty campaigns ruined elections. The Indonesia’s democratic posture is getting worse. Presidential candidates were also divided into the Allah party for supporters of Islamic religious identity and the Ibilis party branded for those who opposed. The principles of democracy, namely respect for human dignity, exclusion of primordial issues, open and fair elections, freedom for voters are actually lost and damage Indonesian democracy. For a long time, the issue of religious identity politics was the most dangerous for democracy and a healthy political process in Indonesia. How was the fate of Christian politicians in such bad religious identity politics at that time when they were nominated by political parties from strong Islam-based regions? The personal attitude of Christian candidates who can be trusted between their words and deeds, speaking less but doing more is able to transcend fears in the politics of religious identity. This research looks at the 2019 and 2014 General Elections to be a reflection towards the 2024 Simultaneous General Elections through in-depth interviews and literature reviews.

Making an Ethnic Group: Lemko-Rusyns and the Minority Question in the Second Polish Republic

Drawing on ethnographic and archival materials, this paper examines the ethnic politics of the Second Polish Republic by taking into account the experiences of the Lemko-Rusyn population, a minority East Slavic group inhabiting the peripheral mountainous area in southern Poland. It illustrates the changing policies towards Lemko-Rusyns and discusses the different responses of the local population to these policies, demonstrating the inadequacy of categories imposed from above as well as manifold motivations behind people's political views, choices of national identification, and religious conversions. In so doing, the article has three main objectives. First, in line with recent critical scholarship on nationalism in the Second Polish Republic, it attempts to problematize the – frequently exaggerated – difference between ‘federational’ and ‘assimilationist’ conceptions, exposing the discriminatory nature of interwar minority politics, as experienced locally. Second, moving beyond the interwar period, the article presents the long-term consequences of the interwar policies and the events of the Second World War, including a series of ethnic cleansings that took place in the aftermath of the war as well as present-day discourses on and policies towards ethnic and national minorities. And third, in discussing state actors' agency in the domain of minority policies, it calls for a more thorough recognition of the agency of the people who are the target of those policies. The article considers all these issues by presenting a history of a Lemko-Rusyn locality and its inhabitants, as recorded in school records, state reports, and oral histories.

Félix Varela’s Hemispheric Interventions

This chapter recovers the transnational and hemispheric interests and influences of the Catholic priest Félix Varela (1788–1853), who lived for almost thirty years in the US and was nicknamed the “Father of the Irish” during his lifetime. It challenges the fractured reading of Varela’s archive in the scholarly literature, where he is normally studied only as an influential Cuban philosopher, his impact on US history having passed almost without note, and fills this lacuna by illustrating the manner in which Varela played a key role in the Protestant-Catholic debates of the 1830s–1840s and in the secularization of the public school system of New York City. Varela’s religious-ethical works Cartas a Elpidio (1835, 1838) demonstrate how these debates facilitated the emergence of minority politics in the US and the important role of Latina/os to that emergence. Nowhere is this more evident than in Varela’s annotated translation of Thomas Jefferson’s Manual of Parliamentary Practice, which exhibits a hemispheric reach and significance. It was intended for Spanish-speaking residents of the US, for readers in the nascent republics of Latin America and in colonial Cuba. An examination of Varela’s US archive, beyond his supposed authorship of Jicoténcatl (1826), locates Varela, on a Latino Continuum that reveals these early Latina/o writers as cultural actors shaping the very foundation of US history while also engaging broader ideas in Latin American political and cultural life. It thereby fundamentally challenges contemporary scholars to rethink the still existing divides between American, Latin American, Cuban, and Latinx studies.

Depleting democracy? The radical right’s impact on minority politics in Eastern Europe

Radical right parties’ calls for a strong and illiberal nation-state have travelled across the political spectrum into the mainstream in Eastern Europe since the 2000s, contributing to a rightward shift in the region’s politics. The mechanisms behind such influences in Eastern Europe are not yet fully understood. Focusing on the strength of radical right parties and mainstream parties’ strategic reactions to them, this study explores how and under what circumstances radical right parties exert influence on mainstream parties’ general political positions and on their positions concerning ethnic and national minorities – a group frequently targeted by radical right intolerance in the region. Shifts in parties’ positions are analyzed using comparative data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and the authors’ own Viadrina Expert Survey. The study finds that where mainstream parties formally or informally cooperated with radical right parties or coopted their agenda, lasting rightward position shifts are observable. Consequently, the authors argue that by contributing to rightward shifts, especially on positions concerning minorities, radical right parties play a role in undermining liberal democratic values, thus contributing to the ‘depletion of democracy’.

Crisis of Secularism and Changing Contours of Minority Politics in India

This paper examines the changing nature of Muslim political mobilization in contemporary India in the context of Hindu nationalism’s ascendancy into power and the consequent crisis of traditional Muslim politics. Through an ethnographic case study of the Popular Front of India, we argue that a qualitatively new form of political mobilization is taking place among Indian Muslims centered on an articulation of “self-defense” against a “Hindu nationalist threat.” This politics of self-defense is constructed on the reconciliation of two contradictory processes: use of extensive legal pragmatism, and defensive ethnicization based on Islamic identity. The paper also examines the consequences of the emerging politics of competing ethnicization for even a normative and minimal idea of secularism and how it contributes to the process of decoupling of secularism and democracy in contemporary India.

From Guest-Workers to Settlers

Focusing on theatre, the article reveals how issues regarding Sweden-Finnish migrants’ agency and representation became politicised, problematised and reworked in the beginning of the 1970s. In the popular emotional representation of the early 1970s’ Finnish theatre, the migrant worker was seen as a tragic human casualty of inhuman capitalism. The representation was emotionally relevant both to the radical left with its strong anti-capitalist sentiments and to the rural population in northern and eastern Finland that had been affected by structural change and migration. The tragic migrant characters and the pessimistic view of migration, predominant in Finnish drama, was problematised by the Finnish immigrants to Sweden who did not want to be victimised as exploited guest-workers oppressed by capitalism. As the Sweden-Finnish institutions strengthened in the beginning of the 1970s, active cultural politics sought to increase the immigrants’ agency and their participation in society, politics and culture. It was crucial to replace the negative representation of a passive and resigned guest-worker with a positive image of an active and sociable settler. Mirroring a larger shift in the more nuanced understanding of migration processes and in the Swedish minority politics, the new and positive self-representation was to evolve from community-based cultural activity. The local Sweden-Finnish societies were encouraged to launch spontaneous cultural creation, including collective performances based on their everyday migrant experiences.